Seminar - Dr. Earl McCune - Silicon Valley Style: Project Operations in the Presence of Extreme Risk

Speaker

Dr Earl McCune, Visiting Faculty, TU Delft

Topic

Silicon Valley Style: Project Operations in the Presence of Extreme Risk

Abstract

The name ‘Silicon Valley’ is often synonymous with innovation and technology. This is not an accident, because the style developed in Silicon Valley is unusual in that it embraces project risks and uses them as tools. This impacts not only project organization, but also how teams and businesses are structured. A partnership between business operations and technologists is fundamental to the success of this model: neither is superior to the other.

Speaker's biography

Earl received his Bachelors, Masters, and Doctorate degrees at UC Berkeley, Stanford, and UC Davis respectively. His experience in RF circuits, signals, and systems goes back more than 40 years. Within this career he has founded two Silicon Valley startups; the first one doing modulated direct digital frequency synthesis in 1986 and merged with Proxim in 1991. The second start-up, Tropian, did switch-based efficient RF transmitters from 1996 and was acquired by Panasonic 10 years later. He retired from Panasonic in 2008 as a Corporate Technology Fellow. He now serves as visiting faculty at TU Delft.